Winner Take All, State Take Less?

Cato's Pat Basham writes on research suggesting that winner-take all voting systems do (relatively) better at keeping the size of government under control than do proportional representation systems of the type common in Europe. I couldn't find a link to the original research, so I don't know what the authors control for (I can imagine electoral system serving as a proxy for other background features of the political culture), but the explanation Basham summarizes is plausible on face. One of the authors has an archive of interesting sounding papers in the same vein.